UK Border Agency

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made by the Home Secretary in the other place. The security of our borders is of paramount importance and must be one of the first duties of any Government. It is becoming abundantly clear that the Government are failing in their duty in their oversight and stewardship of the UK Border Agency. The services it is providing are falling far short of what they ought to be. The public are understandably shocked at reports of serious security and immigration lapses by the UK Border Agency over the summer. They are the most serious and pressing of a catalogue of failures on immigration and border enforcement over the past 18 months, which include a six-fold increase in untraceable asylum applicants placed in the controlled archive.

The establishment of an independent inquiry is extremely important and welcome, as it is clear that the two internal investigations instituted by the Home Office would not have been sufficient. The first and crucial step must be to ascertain the implications of the lapses in security and passport controls. In particular, we need to know whether anyone posing a threat to Britain’s national security was allowed to enter the UK during the period in which the decision of Ministers to relax passport checks was taken further than the Home Office said was ordered. It is vital that passenger records are reviewed and a swift investigation undertaken covering the period when the checks were cancelled. We need to know if someone on a watch list entered the UK during this time so that the police and security services can take the necessary steps to protect the public.

The Minister said that Ministers agreed to a pilot scheme to allow border force officers to target intelligence-led checks on higher-risk categories of travellers. However, UKBA officials—admittedly many of them anonymous—have been commenting across media outlets since the news broke. Essentially, they said that the length of queues and the lack of staff led to decisions in July to relax passport checks. Can the Minister confirm that Home Office Ministers asked officials to draw up a range of measures to cut queues at airports and ports during the summer holiday season because they were so concerned at the visible consequences of the cuts that they had made to the budget of the UK Border Agency?

The Statement emphasised that the measures agreed by the Home Secretary in July were subject to a risk-based assessment. Will the Minister give me an assurance that officials are not now being asked to carry the can for using the very discretion given to them by Ministers in July? The reality is that, instead of strengthening the checks year on year as all previous Ministers committed themselves to do, this Home Secretary decided to water them down as official government policy, even though Parliament had not been informed. Officials are now blamed for relaxing the checks further than the Home Secretary intended, but will the Minister confirm that it was the Home Secretary who gave the green light for weaker controls in the first place?

Will the Minister publish correspondence and papers from the Home Office and the UKBA around the decision that Ministers made in the summer and the effects that it had on border controls? The July guidance that relaxed passport controls should be published alongside any other memoranda explaining policy to UK Border Agency officials.

On the question of the independent inquiry, can I be assured that it will take into account the actions of Home Office Ministers and the effect of resource cuts on UKBA decision-making? To what extent have the state of affairs and the catalogue of errors at the UK Border Agency been a response to the budget cuts the agency has faced, including the reduction of thousands of staff and the pressure to cut queues during the summer period?

Since the Government came to power, they have piled new responsibilities on the UK Border Agency. We have debated the responsibilities on a number of occasions, not least in relation to the very misguided approach to the student visa programme. The UK Border Agency has had many responsibilities placed upon it at the same time as it has had to cut back drastically on its budget and on the number of staff that it has in place. Is that not what has now happened? The weakening of controls and the risk assessment are simply the clearest illustration of the failure of the Government to support the UK Border Agency effectively with resources, thereby putting the security of our nation at risk.